“The current food crisis may be an opportunity to revive Africa's farming industry, a senior official at the World Bank, which is doubling agricultural lending to the continent to boost production, said on Thursday.

Vice-President for Africa Obiageli Ezekwesili said the World Bank aimed to help countries implement policy and institutional reforms to boost food production, and to help farmers access research and information and adopt new technologies.
‘This is an awakening for Africa to prioritize agriculture, which used to be a competitive advantage in the past,’ she told Thomson Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) for Africa.
Ezekwesili said African countries in the ‘most vulnerable’ group should have food support grants for their people but that intervention had to be targeted so it reached those in need.
‘We will use our expertise to support institutions in the agricultural sector, because a lot of challenges of making agriculture work in Africa have been about institutional drawbacks and deficiencies,’ Ezekwesili said.
In related WEF news, Xinhua writes that “Participants in the 18th WEF on Africa said on Thursday that governments, multilateral organizations and aid agencies should ensure that African smallholders receive the inputs they need for the next planting season and create the conditions for sustained growth in agriculture to tackle the food crisis.
In a session entitled ‘Food Insecurity: A Perfect Storm’, the panelists believed that despite the critical nature of the challenge, people should have the reason to remain optimistic.
Experts said the private sector had already been working with small farmers to move in this direction and can do more in partnership with governments, multilateral agencies and civil society organizations. They suggested more partnerships between large and small retailers to help ‘shorten supply lines.’
AFP notes that “Solving Africa's power crisis will require greater energy efficiency and countries making better use of renewable resources, the WEF heard Thursday.
The continent, where 600 million people still don't have electricity, has to think of better ways to promote energy efficiency while reducing enormous losses of energy from people illegally plugging into the electricity grid.
Thomson Reuters reports that “Poor African farmers can boost export revenues from agriculture by billions of dollars if they use intellectual property as part of their business plans, a report released at the WEF said on Thursday. The report by Washington-based non-profit organization Light Years IP and supported by Britain's Department for International Development, focuses on the potential intellectual property (IP) to raise income for low earning producers in sub-Saharan Africa.
‘In the course of doing this study, we came to realize that across 14 products there could be an average increase of 230 to 350 percent in the income that could come back to the developing countries,’ Ron Layton, chief executive officer of Light Years IP told reporters.
(Source: web.worldbank.org)